When I think of Call of Duty, I think of the screaming guy behind me, the screaming guys who played the original Modern Warfare down the hall in my college dorm, the screaming guys who show up in voice chat with regularity. Annoyed by the loud presentation and the vague promo information, I went to the play session fully prepared for a generic Call of Duty experience that was maybe 10% different from all of the games that I have been playing for more than a decade now. It was the most honest (and loudest) vocalization of a readiness to be excited that I’ve ever heard.Īnd, god damn it, I did get ready to go. “Let’s go!” No matter what was happening at the time, we were getting ready to “go.” More content, more ideas, more things to become excited about before we saw them.

Between each of those sections, in the small moment of pause between when a loud video stopped playing and when a man on stage began speaking, someone behind me would scream. Like a pseudo-E3 event, the pitch was split into sections that dealt with each part of the new game. I was sitting on the right side of the hangar while the presentation was going on. Black Ops IIII is an entry with a lot of changes. As many outlets have reported, it seems that we are losing narrative in this game for a more ephemeral, replayable multiplayer commitment. It will have a new mode, called Blackout, that is emulating the widely successful battle royale games that have come to dominate games discourse. It’s going to ship with a robust zombies mode. Black Ops IIII is going to have multiplayer without double jumps or boosting. You can, of course, see all of that information in the official release video of the event.

And it was projected at us at ear-splitting volume, shotgun blasts and mystical devices and zombie noises, all powered into our sense organs with the singular purpose of turning us into conduits for the correct Black Ops IIII message.

We filed in, the journalists and the YouTube BLOPs enthusiasts and the Twitch streamers and some portion of the public, to find out about the new game. Seats lined up in rows faced giant screens flanked by massive hanging speaker arrays. The Black Ops IIII announcement took place in an airplane hangar.

Boots on the ground cod